Month: May 2018

It is the beginning of Memorial Day weekend. This is always a mixed bag for me. On the one hand summer is here, my favorite time of the year. Hot weather, swimming, camping, long weekends, scantily clad women, smoking pot and fucking on the beach, Whats not to love. On the other hand, I am probably not going to get to enjoy any of that stuff, I will blink and it will be Labor Day. Sigh!, I hate my life.

Month: May 2018

A couple of weeks ago I heard about something called PCI Passthrough, which is basically giving virtual machines direct access to your hardware. This is useful for many things, the most common being playing Windows games on Linux. Now this is not something I particularly need to do, I don’t play games and even when I do, I generally loose interest pretty quickly. I also have not particularly needed to use Windows for a couple of years now. The only exception being the Oculus Rift, which was great for the first couple of months, but then like all gaming platforms, I lost interest. I was told the best Linux distribution to accomplish this was Arch Linux and it just so happened that I switched to Arch a couple of weeks ago. I have been looking for some new technical challenges lately, something to sharpen my skills and reassert my nerd cred and this seemed like a good project.

Let me first say, this process is a pain in the ass. This is not something for a Linux n00b to tackle. I have years of experience with Linux and it took me 3 days of work to figure it out and make it work. If you are looking for a plug and play solution, this is not it. I am not even going to try and give instructions to do this, I spent too much time going from website to website following different instruction sets by people who swore it worked for them. I did not keep notes and frankly I have no idea what finally worked. What I will say is this will require you to have two video cards in your system, it simply will not work with one video card, it is also easier if you plug in a second mouse and keyboard to dedicate to the VM.

Now while this is a difficult process, it is worth every minute you put into it. The VM works perfectly, I ran Doom 3, Portal and World of Warcraft flawlessly. My next project is to see if I can get the Oculus Rift to work, there are plenty of people who say it works fine this way, but more than a few are also saying it does not, so we shall see.

Month: May 2018

The Electronic Freedom Foundation released a statement recently telling users of OpenPGP based products that they should disable or uninstall the plugin in their email client. One of the affected products was Engimail plugin for Thunderbird, which is what I use. Now mind you, I do not use encrypted email at all, I do maintain a key, but I have never used it for anything other than a few test emails with friends. I do however think it is important have a plan in place, you just never know when such a thing might become useful.

To sum up the vulnerability, basically if an attacker intercepts one of you encrypted emails, they can insert a couple of lines of HTML and send it back to you, when your email client automatically decrypts the message, the HTML code then sends the clear text message back to the attacker. This is actually kind of clever. The problem is it depends of the my client to be configured in a very specific way. If for instance you have a very aggressive junk mail filter, chances are you will never see the email. Also, if you have remote content disabled, this would deny the attacker the ability to run arbitrary javascripts or load anything else remotely. Finally, if you disable HTML and only allow plain text, your email client will strip out anything that is not the plain text message, and even if the HTML is still there, it is rendered as plain text. Any one of these settings is likely to stop this form of attack in its tracks.

While this is kind of a big deal, it is also very easy to protect yourself against. I do not think it is particularly necessary to disable the plug in or uninstall it, unless you are either very paranoid, or know for a fact someone is attacking you. The moral of this story is, please be careful out there, but don’t panic, it is probably not as bad as you think.

Month: May 2018

Shannon and I went to see the new Avengers movie last week and I have to say I was a bit disappointed by the movie for a couple of different reasons. For instance, we know the majority of the characters who died will be resurrected in the next film, there is no way they leave Spiderman, Dr Strange, Black Panther or most of the Guardians of the Galaxy dead. This kind of cheapens the whole thing for me, especially the Groot and Spiderman death scenes. Second, there were three distinct plot lines happening, each with 4 or 5 characters involved. With 15 or so characters in the movie, this meant no one got enough screen time for any meaningful character development. Pretty much everyone got one or two cute lines in and that was pretty much it. Finally, in the comic he was an interesting and dynamic villain with some off the wall motivations, the movie adaption of Thanos was a bland villain whose motivations were not very interesting and in the final battle he basically wins by not loosing.

Tonight, I watched the Justice League for the second time and I think it stood up pretty well. I said when it first came out that the movies biggest problem is it was not an Avengers movie. Now I think it is the other way around, the problem with the Avengers movie is that it was not a Justice League movie. Both movies have similar plots, evil cosmic powered bad guy collecting MacGuffins to destroy something. Both movies were on the dark side, but the big difference was the point of the Justice League, was Bruce Wayne trying to return hope to the world, at the end of the movie, I felt that aim was accomplished. The point of the Avengers movie was to drag the plot out to justify another movie and kill off a bunch of characters so the producers could say “Look at how edgy we are, we killed Spiderman”, and it just felt cheap and shallow.

Month: May 2018

In the original B1 n Search of the Unknown, there was a set of per-generated characters to be used by new players or as hirelings. Bruce and I stole the names of a couple of those characters and played them for almost a year before both died horrible screaming deaths. Recently Goodman games published a Dungeons & Dragons 5E conversion of both B1 In Search of the Unknown and B2 The Keep on the Borderlands called Into the Borderlands. Goodman Games updated several of those characters to 5E, but not Brandon or Evro. I have taken it upon myself to do these conversions.